2007Transform

This week I attended the TMW Systems 2007 user conference down in Orlando, FL with some fellow colleagues from Tradewinds.  As usual, the event was jam packed with sessions and great opportunities to meet other users of the software.  This was the third TMW conference that I have personally attended and am most impressed with how well put together the conference is.

A few key highlights that excite me most about what I heard at the conference are as follows:

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)

TMW is embracing the web services revolution that started about 10 years ago, but is just now gaining momentum in this industry among others.  They are working on developing a complete SOA architecture for their product which is most exciting for the flexibility this will allow.   

.NET Migration

They are continuing to migrate away from Powerbuilder and over to the .NET platform.  The .NET framework continues to make huge strides in developing a framework that allows developers to spend more time focusing on implementing business rules and user interfaces rather than on the common mundane common coding components that make up most applications.  .NET is continuing to grow in the marketplace and seeing they are embracing this technology is definitely a step in the right direction.

Strategic acquisitions 

With the recent acquisition of Truckmate into their portfolio of products and the announcement at the conference of the buyout of IDSC, it is apparent that TMW is positioning themselves as single point of solution.  I have no doubt that they will continue to work to integrate these products more tightly into common architecture and interface.  Think of what the large ERP package SAP has done for manufacturing, pharma, etc.  If they can become the ERP of choice of the trucking world, having a one stop vendor is convenient.  I of course realize that it can be a double edged sword in that you are “cornered” into a single vendor’s model, but again, that is where the migration to SOA comes into the picture opening the possibilities.

Knowledge Capital

And lastly, I continue to be most impressed with the actual employees, software engineers and support staff at TMW.  As their organization grows, they continue to bring in some very sharp people.  This makes me as an end user feel confident that they are committed to delivering an excellent product and will continue to evolve their product lines, which in the end helps make my job easier! 

My biggest surprise from the event was actually one of my only disappointments.  I had built an imaging system from scratch called TOLIA (Tradewinds OnLine Image Access). 

This system consists of several modules that integrate with TMW.  It has worked well for us for over two years and this year I thought I’d checkout the “TMW Imaging” product.  I had seen other imaging solutions, all of them very neat, but way overkill, complex and costly for what we need (and I’d assume we are the norm).  My goal was to compare what their system did to what ours did so I could maybe implement some new bells and whistles.

I was shocked when I saw that the system was actually built on top of a non .NET platform leveraging cgi-bin and what I can only describe as a clunky and arguably ineficient interface.  I thought for sure I’d be looking at an ASP.NET web application that followed a similar look and feel to their other applications, however it is very different.  I’ll post a blog entry detailing the components of the system we have built at Tradewinds.  I’m always interested to hear what other trucking companies have done in this regard.  And for those that are using this imaging system, what do their users think? 

In  closing, I know our team walked away with a ton of ideas and are already hard at work implementing the takeaways from the conference.  I’m looking forward already to next years conference to be held in the same location.

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